On Twitter/X "for you" feed, I'm frequently served posts by handles that are openly hostile toward Wikipedia. The most often cited reason is excessive fundraising / bloat (previously it was bias). But in my opinion, whatever bloat the Wikipedia organization suffers from, it is still a better alternative than all the other ad/engagement driven platforms.

There's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.

Eh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.

Except for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed]

Fixed.

By now they should be sitting on a billion dollars that safely yields a forever self-funding annual income ($30m-$50m) that would pay for all of their necessary expenses. They would no longer require any donations. It's grotesque and wildly irresponsible how they're managing the organization. If LLMs become the center of knowledge resources going forward (which they will), Wikipedia's funding will decline as their traffic declines, and they'll collapse into a spiral of cut-backs, as they operate on a present structure that burns most of its financial capability annually (this opens them up to a shock to the system on inflection, which is happening now).